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Season Greetings from Nicaragua – Nica Nuggets

Darrell-Bushnell

Season Greetings from Nicaragua – Nica Nuggets

Season greetings to everyone

We, Paul Daemen and Ghislaine Sieveking, have taken over the Nica Nuggets newsletter and social media platform.

We did a video with Amy and Darrell Bushnell going over their 15 year journey in Nicaragua and how the NicaNuggets blog and newsletter got started.

Here is the link to the video we recorded with them

https://youtu.be/W_HhMSm
Let me introduce ourselves. Ghislaine and I started our journey to Nicaragua in 2014. We both visited Nicaragua in the 80’s Ghislaine as a child and me as a marketing person for a biotech firm marketing hybrid seed.

Ghislaine was born in Chile and left when she was two years old. She arrived Canada 9 years later after driving with her family from Chile north to Peru, Ecuador, Colombia. In Colombia they spend a few years and then onwards to Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. She became a Canadian citizen at age 11, and moved to the the USA at age 16.

I left the Netherlands at age two and went with my parents to Curacao, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico for 13 years.  My dad was a CPA and an Attorney which required us to move around to different cities as well as countries. This was the beginning of me becoming a perpetual expat.

I came back to Nicaragua in 2013 after visiting Esteli for a client that was in need to reorganize his cigar operation. After a week in Nicaragua my mind started to look at the possibilities to return and retire in Nicaragua.

Ghislaine and I have known each other since 2002 due to our work in Real Estate and started dating in 2014 after encouraging words from Ghislaine’s daughter. Ghislaine came with her brother to see if she also felt the same way as I did about Nicaragua. She visited and stayed in various places over a three month period Granada, San Juan Del Sur, Managua, Esteli and she decided upon her return that we should concentrate in Granada area.

Before our decision was made we did an analysis of the various countries we had considered in Latin America from Chile, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico, and of course Nicaragua. Our relocation parameters was not only based on numbers such as living expenses, cost of buying a home, cost to travel to home country USA. We have three kids we like to visit every year, and also residency requirements, incentives for foreign residents and qualtiy of life, ease of running a business and could we run a real estate business.   

We bought our farm with a home on a three acre piece of land filled with fruit trees and lined up with over 1000 cactus, that’s why we call our home Cactus Ranch.

We have 7 dogs and have build upon our property and expanded the fruit trees, five fruit and vegetable gardens.

We love to cook, the style is different between each other and we have some great battles, but in all honesty she is a far better cook. But that will be for another article.

Here is a short video of my take of Gallo Pinto https://youtu.be/oK86MfVbqbY

As with everything that occurs in taking over a business or social media is the learning curve. In this newsletter we are slowly learning the content and how to organiza this so that you the reader continue to read as well as share the content to others who wish to move overseas, and specifically Nicaragua.